Broadcasting Corp of China (BCC) chairman Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康) yesterday filed a lawsuit against former president and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) and former KMT Investment Management Committee chairman Liu Tai-ying (劉泰英) for breach of trust.
His lawsuit followed Tuesday’s decision by the Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee that the BCC was a KMT affiliate and its order that the nation’s largest radio broadcaster return “unduly obtained” land and buildings to the government.
The order covered the land on which The Palace, a luxury apartment building on Taipei’s Renai Rd, was built, which is valued at about NT$7.73 billion (US$249.08 million).
Photo: Lee Yi-chun, Taipei Times
Jaw told reporters that the biggest controversy surrounding the committee’s announcement involved the Renai Rd properties where the The Palace was built.
He said he had evidence showing that Liu and Lee had agreed on the KMT selling the BCC’s properties on Renai to the party’s Central Investment Holding Co for the below-market-value price of NT$8.8 billion.
Central Investment Holding resold the properties to Hong Sheng Construction Co for NT$9 billion, he said.
The profit the KMT made from the sale, about NT$290 million, was donated to the Taiwan Research Institute, in which Liu was president and Lee served as honorary chairman, Jaw said.
The KMT later overpaid for the purchase of buildings on Taipei’s Songjiang Rd and Linsen N Rd by about NT$2.4 billion, he said.
“Even though BCC’s financial statement did not show that KMT embezzled funds from the radio company, the under-the-table dealings conducted by the KMT have harmed the BCC,” Jaw said.
The Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee should investigate those transactions.
Meanwhile, the National Communications Commission (NCC) is to review changes in BCC’s shareholding structure and ownership after it receives the official notice of the assets settlement committee’s decision.
“We have not received any official notification from the committee yet, but its news conference said that it had determined that BCC was controlled by KMT at one point. However, it also said that after BCC was sold in 2006 for below market value to four companies that own the broadcaster, the BCC is now freed of the party’s control,” NCC Specialist Chen Shu-ming (陳書銘) said.
“We need to verify this matter with the committee and examine its shareholding structure to see if the radio company would contravene regulations banning political parties, the government and the military from investing in the broadcast media,” Chen said.
The commission had in 2016 taken back radio spectrum granted to BCC to counter the broadcast of Chinese Communist Party propaganda during the Cold War, and reassigned for use by the Hakka Affairs Council and the Council of Indigenous People, which have set the spectrum aside for use by radio stations for Hakka-speaking and Aboriginal communities.
BCC applied three times to establish a separate asset management firm to manage its properties, but each request was rejected by the commission, Chen said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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